An intense interest in the whole range of Russian poetry, from the powerfully clumsy Derzhavin to that Aeschylus of the Russian iambic line, Tiutchev, preceded the advent of Futurism. All the old poets at that time—roughly before the beginning of the World War—suddenly seemed new. A fever of reappraisal and the hasty correction of historical injustice and short memory seized everyone. Essentially, all Russian poetry at that time struck the new inquisitiveness and the renovated hearing capacity of the reader as metalogical. A revolutionary reappraisal of the past preceded the revolution in creativity. Affirmation and legitimation of the real values of the past is just as much a revolutionary act as the creation of new values. Most unfortunately, however, memory and deed soon parted company; they did not proceed hand in hand. Futurizers and his-torizers very quickly found themselves in two hostile camps. The futurizers indiscriminately rejected the past, though their rejection was no more than dietetic. For hygienic reasons they denied themselves a reading of the old poets, or they read them surreptitiously, without letting on in public. And the historists prescribed themselves exactly the same kind of diet. I would even go so far as to say that many respectable literary men, right up to recent times when they were forced to do it, did not read their contemporaries. It would seem that the history of literature had never before known such an irreconcilable hostility and lack of understanding. The hostility between the Romantics and the Classicists, let us say, was child’s play compared to the abyss that opened up in Russia. But quite soon a criterion came to hand that facilitated a meeting of minds in this impassioned literary litigation between two generations: whoever does not understand the new has no comprehension of the old, and whoever comprehends the old is bound to understand the new as well. Only misfortune results when, instead of the real past with its deep roots, we get “former times.” “Former times” means easily assimilated poetry, a henhouse with a fence around it, a cosy little corner where the domestic fowl cluck and scratch about. This is not work done upon the word, but rather a rest from the word. The boundaries of such a world of comfortable repose from active poetry are now defined approximately by Akhmatova and Blok, and not because Akhmatova or Blok, after the necessary winnowing of their works, are bad in themselves—for Akhmatova and Blok were never meant for people with a moribund sense of language. And if the linguistic consciousness of the age approached its death in them, it was dying gloriously. It was “that which in a rational being we call the heightened diffidence of suffering,” and certainly not the inveterate stupidity bordering on malicious ignorance of their dedicated opponents and adherents. Akhmatova, using the purest literary language of her time, adapted with extraordinary steadfastness the traditional devices of the Russian folksong, and not only Russian, but the folksong in general. What we find in her poems is by no means a psychological affectation, but the typical parallelism of the folksong, with its acute asymmetry of two adjacent theses, on the pattern of: “My elderbush is in the yard; my uncle is in Kiev.” This is where her twofold stanza with the unexpected thrust at the end comes from. Her poems are close to the folksong not only in structure but in essence, asserting themselves always and invariably as laments. Keeping in mind the poet’s purely literary lexicon, filtered through her clenched teeth, these qualities make her especially interesting, allowing one to discern a peasant woman in this twentieth-century Russian literary lady.
Blok is the most complex phenomenon of literary eclecticism, a gatherer of the Russian poetry strewn and scattered by the historically shattered nineteenth century. The great work of collecting Russian poetry accomplished by Blok is still not clear to his contemporaries and is felt by them only instinctively as melodic power. Blok’s acquisitive nature, his effort to centralize poetry and language, recalls the state-building instinct of the historic figures of Muscovy. His is a firm, stern hand as far as any provincialism is concerned: everything for Moscow, which in the given case is to say, for the historically formed poetry of the traditional language used by this proponent of a centralized poetic state. Futurism is all in its provincialisms, in its tumult reminiscent of the medieval appanages, in its f olkloric and ethnographic cacophony. Try looking for that in Blok! Poetically, his work went at right angles to history and serves to prove that the government of language lives its own special life.
Fundamentally, Futurism ought not to have directed its barbs against the paper fortress of Symbolism, but rather against the living and genuinely dangerous figure of Blok. And if it failed to do this, it was only because of its characteristic inner piety and its literary propriety.
Futurism confronted Blok with Khlebnikov. What could they say to each other? Their battle continues, even in our own time when neither the one nor the other is any longer among the living. Like Blok, Khlebnikov thought of language as if it were a state, only not spatial, not territorial, but temporal. Blok is contemporary to the marrow of his bones; his time will go to rack-ruin and be forgotten; yet he will remain in the consciousness of generations to come as a contemporary of his own time. Khlebnikov does not know what a contemporary is. He is a citizen of all history, of the whole system of language and poetry. He is like some sort of idiotic Einstein who doesn’t know how to tell which is closer, a railroad bridge or the Igor Tale. Khlebnikov’s poetry is idiotic in the authentic, innocent, Greek sense of the word. His contemporaries could not and cannot forgive him the absence in his work of any reference to the madness of his own time. How terrifying it must have seemed when this man, oblivious of his interlocutor, without distinguishing his own time from all the ages, yet appeared in a persona that seemed unusually sociable, and gifted to a high degree with the purely Pushkinian gift of poetic small talk. Khlebnikov jokes, and nobody laughs. Khlebnikov makes light, elegant allusions, and nobody understands them. A very large part of what Khlebnikov has written is not more than light poetic small talk as he understood it, corresponding to the digressions from Evgeny One gin, or to Pushkin’s “Order yourself some macaroni with Parmesan in Tver, and make an omelette” [“Zakazhi sebe v Tveri/S parmezanom makaroni,/ I iaichnitsu svari”]. He wrote comic dramas—The World from its End-side [Mir s kontsa]—and tragic buffonades—Miss Death [Baryshnia smert’]. He provided models of a marvelous prose, virginal and, like the story of a child, incomprehensible, because of the onrush of images and ideas pushing and crowding one another right out of consciousness. Each line he wrote is the beginning of a new long poem. Every tenth line is an aphorism, seeking a stone or bronze plaque on which to come to rest. It wasn’t even poems or epics that Khlebnikov wrote, but a huge all-Russian prayer-and-icon book, from which for centuries upon centuries everyone who has the requisite energy will be able to draw.
Alongside Khlebnikov, as if for contrast, the mocking genius of fate placed Mayakovsky, with his poetry of common sense. There is common sense in any poetry. But specific common sense is nothing other than a pedagogical device. Schoolteaching that instills previously well-established truths into childish heads makes use of visual aids—that is, of a poetic tool. The pathos of common sense is part of schoolteaching. Mayakovsky’s merit is in his poetic perfection of schoolteaching, in applying the powerful methods of visual education to the enlightenment of the masses. Like a schoolteacher, Mayakovsky walks about with a globe of the world or some other emblem of the visual method. He has replaced the repulsive newspaper of recent times, in which no one could understand anything, with a simple, wholesome schoolroom. A great reformer of the newspaper, he has left a profound imprint in our poetic language, simplifying its syntax to the limit of the possible and directing the noun to the place of honor and primacy in the sentence. The force and precision of his language make Mayakovsky akin to the traditional carnival side-show barker.4 Both Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky are national to such a degree that populism—that is, folklore with a crude sugar-coating—would seem to have no place beside them. It continues to exist, however, in the poetry of Esenin, and to some degree in that of Kliuev, too.5 The significance of these poets is in their rich provincialisms, which link them to one of the basic tendencies of our age.